![]() HMA was able to retain its contract after the state police investigation partly because of the lobbying efforts of HMA’s president, Leonard Dunn, a Pine Bluff banker who later worked on Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign. ![]() ADC director Art Lockhart, about whom many allegations of impropriety had been raised, was not punished being an employee of the ADC board, he could not be fired by Clinton, and he had a protector in the powerful state Senator Knox Nelson of Pine Bluff. Clinton urged a swift end to the investigation. In contrast, the state police investigation found only that a few HMA employees had been running a small-time gambling operation. The institute discovered instances in which HMA had violated its state contract in forty areas, including poor health assessment and recordkeeping and the hiring of unlicensed, uncertified, and unqualified staff. At the same time, Governor Bill Clinton ordered the state police to conduct a similar investigation. In 1985, the Arkansas Board of Corrections hired the Institute for Law and Policy Planning (ILPP) in Berkeley, California, to conduct an independent investigation into HMA’s practices. They had simply referred to the sources as the ‘ADC Plasma Center, Grady, Arkansas,’ without any indication that ‘ADC’ stood for ‘Arkansas Department of Correction.’” In 1984, the FDA revoked the license of the HMA plasma center after it had distributed hepatitis-contaminated plasma, though it managed to secure its license again after a few months. According to a report by the Krever Commission, which was established by the Canadian government in 1993 to investigate the blood scandal, “The shipping papers accompanying the plasma had not revealed that the centre was located in a prison. Only during a 1983 FDA-initiated international recall of plasma likely tainted with hepatitis B did Cryosan learn that it had been buying plasma extracted from prisoners. Cryosan sold the plasma to companies in Europe and Japan and to Connaught Laboratories, a company based in Toronto, Ontario, that sold blood products needed by hemophiliacs throughout Canada. ![]() ![]() Despite this, HMA contracted with Continental Pharma Cryosan Ltd., Canada’s largest blood broker. Many pharmaceutical companies ceased buying prison plasma after a December 1982 warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that prisoners were more likely than the general population to be infected with the AIDS virus. Other misdeeds included an inmate clerk in the prison’s plasma center selling the “right to bleed” to fellow inmates who had been excluded because they likely were infected with hepatitis B (a possible indicator of HIV infection). Prisoners were not adequately screened for disease, and state investigators later confirmed allegations that some prisoners were not paid in cash but in drugs. The problems with the prison plasma program were legion. HMA sold each unit of plasma for fifty dollars, and the donating prisoner was usually paid seven dollars in scrip. (HMA), founded by pediatrician Francis “Bud” Henderson of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), to run both the prison medical program and the plasma program. In 1978, the state contracted with Health Management Associates Inc. Staugh, it was, from 1967 to 1978, managed at various times by a group of physicians from the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Campus (now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences) in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and by the Department of Correction itself. (Arkansas law forbids paying prisoners for their labor.) Set up by Birmingham, Alabama, physician August R. In 1994, Arkansas became the last state to stop selling plasma extracted from prisoners.Īrkansas’s prison blood program began in 1964 as a way for both prisoners and the prison system to make money. Revelation of the misdeeds and the healthcare crisis it created in Canada nearly brought down the Liberal Party government in 1997. Corruption among the administrators of the prison blood program and poor supervision resulted in disease-tainted blood, often carrying hepatitis or HIV, knowingly being shipped to blood brokers, who in turn shipped it to Canada, Europe, and Asia. The Arkansas prison blood scandal resulted from the state’s selling plasma extracted from prisoners at the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction (ADC).
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